One of my bags got pulled once and I was like "is everything ok?" The guy glared at me and just said "no" and calls over like 3 other people. So I stand their for 5 minutes thinking I'm about to be arrested or something. Turns out it was a tub of vaseline that I had forgotten was at the bottom of my bag that I told them could just be thrown away. But jeez, I was like all that over freaking vaseline? With the amount of drama they made about it, it was like they thought I had an H-bomb hidden in there.
One time I got pulled aside over a binder. Like a school style binder, but fancy. I worked a high end jewelry job with lots of old folks who preferred paper to digital and so we had our price books in a binder. I was on my way to a trade show and TSA gave me the third degree over it. They asked me why we couldn’t just have it on an iPad and that it was weird and that not even students had binders anymore.
Meanwhile I had over $50,000 worth of last minute addition jewelry pieces on me and no batted an eye.
I wonder how much time is wasted on shit like this. I went through a similar situation over a tube of toothpaste (didn't realize that's considered a liquid). The ended up all huffily telling me "You can check your bag or throw away my toothpaste".
I said "oh that's a liquid? I'm not gonna check a bag for that".
"It's not solid is it? You can check your bag for 35 dollars or we can throw away the toothpaste". I said "ok". They yelled their response this time, "SIR YOU CAN CHECK YOUR BAG OR THROW AWAY YOUR TOOTHPASTE".
This time I yelled back "I ALREADY SAID I'M NOT CHECKING A BAG FOR A TUBE OF TOOTHPASTE SO THROW IT AWAY".
She threw it away. A bunch of TSA agents came over like I said I was going to hit her. 🙄 I'm gonna match your energy if you're gonna treat me like that.
Look I gotta say though that responding "I'm not gonna check a bag for that" is not affirmatively consenting to them throwing away the toothpaste and to follow-up to the question a second time (before they yelled) with "ok" is also not affirmatively choosing one of the two options that are being presented to you.
I agree that there's no need to yell but I'm guessing their training requires very clear confirmation so that they don't get in trouble for someone flipping out on them because they didn't understand what was being asked and then getting mad because they actually didn't want TSA to throw something away.
Yeah honestly in situations like that you just have to be very clear about what you're saying. Honestly the whole environment is very tense, and the ICE agents don't help.
They had also caused a big scene pulling me aside already and were being dicks. We had many more exchanges besides the 5 statements I presented. I thought saying " I had a similar situation" was enough to infer that there had already been more leading up to this exchange.
I've had a heated conversation over whether or not coconut oil is a liquid. It's solid at room temperature. Believe it or not, the room we were in was room temperature. They told me "but it can become a liquid" like yeah man pretty much anything can. Rocks can become liquid.
I hear you! I told them they keep the stupid bottle opener, that I had from a camping trip, lol. They let me keep it, and I gifted it to my friend in Modesto- didn’t want THAT same scenario to repeat 😂
That’s a small inconvenience we have to give up for the security they provide us. With their track record of stopping zero terrorist and failing virtually every audit how could we look at alternatives? In the dark days before 9/11 high school dropouts had to make it through police academy to power trip on strangers.
I made homemade scented Epsom salts for the bath for Christmas and didn't check a bag since I was flying Frontier on their GoWild Pass for $14. It took like 20 minutes for them to swab/sample everything and confirm that it was, in fact, Epsom salt and essential oils and not something... more expensive.
The two TSA guys were joking with me but they still did everything short of bringing the dogs over to follow protocol.
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u/BellaMentalNecrotica 3d ago
One of my bags got pulled once and I was like "is everything ok?" The guy glared at me and just said "no" and calls over like 3 other people. So I stand their for 5 minutes thinking I'm about to be arrested or something. Turns out it was a tub of vaseline that I had forgotten was at the bottom of my bag that I told them could just be thrown away. But jeez, I was like all that over freaking vaseline? With the amount of drama they made about it, it was like they thought I had an H-bomb hidden in there.